


Open Wings

by Ruby_fruit



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik, The West Wing
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 21:49:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruby_fruit/pseuds/Ruby_fruit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Leo is a dragon. Post-Rosslyn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Open Wings

“I have some ideas for staffers already - Ziegler, Cregg, Lyman. Noah’s boy may have someone to bring aboard as well.” Leo says, his head weaving slightly as he looked between Abbey on the ground and Jed on his back.

Abbey raises an eyebrow, but Jed has no response to Leo naming someone for his staff who’s already in harness. He’s pacing Leo’s back, between the double set of ridges - not for the first time, but for the first time as captain - his carabiners loose and dragging. 

“You’re a map of the world, Leo,” Jed says, crouching to run a hand across the rippled scars left by a Japanese firebreather. The weight of their preceding conversation hangs heavy in the air. Abbey watches them, feeling much further from her husband than the height of Leo’s back.

“Hmm,” Leo says, amused, “Only the places we’ve fought.” 

Leo is not usually demonstrative, too old and too proud with too many Captains in the ground, but now he leans over his own back to nuzzle Jed like any dragon might with their captain. 

“We are going to leap off the mountain, you and I,” Leo says, a delighted thrum in his tone.

Jed laughs, and the sun gleams off his hair, off Leo’s countless scales as Jed leans his head against the soft scales above serrated teeth.

“As long as you keep your wings open, old worm.”

****

Jed is barely out of the limo and onto a stretcher before wind and roaring shakes the building and they hustle Jed into the pre-op room, winching open the dragon window and all but the essential personnel clear away from Jed’s bed as Leo thrusts his head into the room. Abbey barely recognizes him, face bloody, teeth bloody, near-black dragon blood and bright red human dripping onto the tile. The soft scales of Leo’s face are torn and scraped and Leo, neat, reserved Leo is moaning, rumbling, the whole room vibrating with his distress.

Abbey put her daughters into Leo’s claws before they could even walk, they learned to climb dragon rigging on his patient back. She has never been frightened of him. Jed smiles up at the great head hanging over him, and the bloody tongue licks out to smell him. Jed reaches up with arm on his uninjured side and finds a clean spot on the soft blue nose to pet and Leo - so careful of the ways personal affection and their job can get messy that he won’t even let Jed sit on his foreleg for photo-ops - leans in as close as he can, forcing the nurse to duck his bloody chin as she works around him.

“Hey there, big guy,” Jed says, thumb stroking the end of Leo’s muzzle over and over, “you got dinged up out there, huh? Nothing serious, is it? ‘Cause you could go wait with Ron over there in the aspirin line.” Leo stops moaning and shakes his head mutely.

“I’m fine, really,” Jed says, “Got winged is all, the docs are gonna check me out just to make sure, but it’ll be okay, all right?”

“Jed,” Leo says. Twenty-three tons of finely bred military dragon and he sounds as small and lost as a child.

Jed leans up, slow and careful, and kisses a clean patch of scale. “I’ll be fine.”

Leo hesitates, nods once and then pulls back, not quite out of the room, eyes intent on Jed they wheel him out. The room breathes a little easier and there is a long minute of order and competence as they bustle Jed into OR . The anesthesiologist glances back at Abbey as the door swings closed but Abbey’s husband is in surgery and their dragon is bleeding all over the hospital floor. She really doesn’t care, he’ll tell or he won’t, it’s out of her hands. Right now Leo’s going to have a job to do while Jed’s under and he can’t do it looking like a bloody ruin. Abbey realizes she has no idea where Leo’s runners are, or even if they’re alive.

Abbey’s moving for the door when they bring Josh in in a rush of shouting and far far too much blood. Nero crying frantically at being separated from him and Leo shouting Josh’s name just once, but painfully loud. One big orderly actually puts her shoulder against the little dragon’s speckled chest and shoves to keep him back from the OR doors. It moves Nero not at all, but it does make him pause briefly, and when he puts his head down to hiss at the orderly the woman snaps at him to back off if he wants his captain to live through this. Nero deflates at once, hunching in on himself on the bloody floor, looking lost and miserable, incongruous in his bright, cheery colors against the deep blue bulk of Leo above him, staring at the doors they’d wheeled Josh through and looking like he’d just taken a dive from a Regal Copper.

Abbey can’t help her husband and she can’t help Josh but these two, these two she can help. And if she just stands here for one more minute she’s going to scream. If she stands here any longer she’s afraid she’ll see another member of her family come through those doors on a stretcher.

“Nero,” Abbey says, moving towards the little beast. 

“Abbey? Abbey!” Nero fixes her with those virulent green eyes and nearly knocks Abbey off her feet in his need for comfort. Over them, Leo hisses repressively. Nero eases up, cowed but still nudging at Abbey anxiously for petting, his mottled pink, orange and yellow tail coiling around her legs.

Abbey smooths her hands over Nero’s spiny head. The poor thing is trembling, nearly panting. Josh took him out of the egg himself, almost twenty years ago. He’s as smart and vicious and driven as Josh is, and right now he could be one of her daughters after a nightmare. Abbey looks him in the eye, his head in her hands. 

“They’re good doctors, Nero, good doctors.” Abbey puts as much conviction as she can in her voice without making any promises, “And they know how important Josh is to us. They’re gonna do the absolute best they can.”

It’s not much as reassurances go, but some of the strung-wire tension goes out of Nero and above them Leo shivers, the dragon window rattling in its frame. Abbey looks up to his hovering presence, and decides. 

“Leo, I don’t have a harness on me, will you get us out of here? If we’re going to wait here we should do it out of the way.”

Leo takes a minute to process, eyes on the closed doors, “Yes, of course, Dr. Bartlett.”

He retreats and reaches a foreclaw in for her, one talon marred with a thick white line of scar tissue where he broke it on a German bomber. Abbey steps carefully over Nero’s tail, into Leo’s palm.

The closest pavilion to the hospital only has a slender middle-weight in it and she clears out quickly when Leo’s enormous shadow falls over her. Leo sets Abbey down carefully on the edge of the pavilion and settles himself, tense and coiled. Blood makes a small pattering sound on the smooth worn stone and Abbey realizes Leo is still bleeding. There’s an intercom on the pillar near her and she tells the hospital to call a dragon surgeon. 

“I’m fine,” Leo says, remote, his head drawn up the length of his neck and looking at the hospital, as if he could see through stone if he stared long enough.

“You’re bleeding.” Abbey is tired, down to her bones.

“It’s a scratch.” 

Leo - scrupulous, polite, gentlemanly - Leo still isn’t looking at her. Irritation scrapes up under Abbey’s exhaustion, like talons on steel.

“Then it won’t take them long to look you over, will it?”

Leo’s claws make a horrible grating noise on the stone. “Dammit, Abbey.”

She rolls right over him, so angry she can feel it building up to tears in the back of her throat. “Do not, don’t you _dare_ , ‘dammit, Abbey’ me. Do you think sitting up here covered in blood will make Jed heal faster? Do you think getting blood poisoning from an infection will keep anyone else from getting _shot_ tonight? My god, Leo.” Abbey’s voice breaks and she sucks in a harsh breath, presses a hand to her eyes, pushes her hair back and glares up at Leo, a looming blot against the stars, staring at her with wide eyes.

“Do you think losing you instead wouldn’t wreck Jed? That this would be any better if they’d had dragon guns instead of handguns?” Abbey’s hands shake and she curls them into fists. “He loves you. It would kill him.” 

Leo’s eyes slide shut and his shoulders hunch, his whole coiled body curving in to protect his breast, like Abbey was up to his weight and had delivered a body-blow. Abbey’s heart hurts for him, for herself, for Nero. 

“Ninety-seven years of service, Abbey,” Leo says, low and scraped raw. “Ninety-seven years of service and I couldn’t keep my family safe from two kids with guns.”

“Oh, Leo. “ Abbey puts a hand on his forearm and Leo’s talons curve around her reflexively.

“I killed them, you know. Tore the front of the building open and just… bit down.” 

Abbey’s stomach turns over, seeing again the blood on Leo’s jaws, his teeth, his tongue. She keeps petting him, slow and soothing over his forearm.

“I don’t know how I’m gonna tell Jed. He’s got no heart for violence, especially not like this, never did.”

“He’ll understand, Leo.” 

How couldn’t he? Even Abbey understands, here in the dark with the coppery smell of blood all around her, that there was no other outcome. Kids or not, they’d opened fire on a dragon’s crew. They’d tried to murder her family right in front of Leo. Like a building would have been any deterrent, like Leo wouldn’t level half the city for Jed. Dragon or Secret Service, those boys had died when they pulled the trigger. That Leo put his mouth around two sixteen year-olds and turned them into so much unrecognizable human wreckage barely signifies. 

Leo’s voice is low and wretched. “I don’t know how to tell him I don’t regret it.”

Abbey takes a deep breath, then another.

“I put my baby girls in your claws, Leo.” He stares at her, uncomprehending. “I—we trust you. Jed wasn’t flying with his eyes closed when he accepted you as more than a family friend. You think he didn’t know what he was getting into?”

Leo opens his mouth to reply, and is interrupted by a furious, tea-kettle hiss. Nero lands in front them with a rush of bright wings and sits up on his haunches with all his spines bristling, glaring up at Leo, wings mantled. He is not quite as large as Leo’s head.

“Shove it. If you hadn’t killed them, I would have! And not felt bad at all after, so you can stop with all the guilt, since you only did what you should.” Leo put his head back, slit pupils narrowing at being spoken to so rudely by so much smaller a dragon.

Nero puffed his chest out, “And we’re not in your office or anywhere near the White House so don’t you glare at me, since _your_ captain will be fine, I heard them say.” His voice shakes a little. “If President Bartlet minded so much that people who tried to kill him and Josh and everyone else might get dragon-clawed, he wouldn’t have taken a dragon, and certainly not one who’d been in wars. He’s not stupid, he knew what would happen if anyone were stupid enough to try something.” 

Nero’s wings sweep back irritably. “And besides, you only got to them first because I was farther back.” he finishes rather defensively, and cranes his head back to peer anxiously at the hospital and his own captain.

 

Leo lets out a low huff, but he lets Nero stay, and even noses the little dragon’s prickly back as he settles himself.

“There now, you see no one is going to blame you, Leo,” Abbey says softly, “Least of all Jed. Certainly not me. And the only people who are going to be going on about how attached dragons shouldn’t serve office are going to be the rags, and they can shove it.” 

Nero hisses his agreement, fidgeting irritably, cat-like. 

“You’re the Chief of Staff. Leo, The President’s Dragon. They don’t call it that so it can be filled by a person. We’d be lost without you.” 

Leo’s talons are slowly curving around her. She steps carefully into his palm again and Nero hops up as Leo shifts, his body coiling around, tail coiling around, cradling her close with wings half spread over all. Abbey can just see the hospital past Leo’s muzzle. She is warm, safe, worried. 

“Honestly, Leo, what we do to you, I’d have ditched us all years ago.”

Leo makes a low, questioning noise, talons curving a little closer around her. Past him Abbey can see a car coming up the hill, the dragon surgeon.

“We take you for granted,” Abbey says into the dark and the quiet. “I know Jed does, you’ve been such a constant in his life. I cannot imagine how you keep doing this.”

Abbey makes a helpless gesture, indicating herself, Nero, the hospital before them. Indicating history. A hundred and fifty years of life, ninety-seven years of military service, countless captains. She cannot fathom how his heart keeps going after being broken so often. Abbey feels utterly inadequate to the task of comforting him. She leans her cheek against Leo’s.

Leo huffs, and if his amusement is cracked and grim, it’s there, at least.

“I just keep my wings open, Abbey.”

 

****

 

Abbey hears them before she sees them. She comes out from the residence, she blinks hard and the big blue-gold blur that is Leo sharpens in the afternoon light, her husband pacing the space between his forelegs.

“I’m not saying we should throw out the Voting Rights Act out the window and start over, but you know as well as I do – and don’t give me that look, Leo – that eighteen years for a dragon and eighteen years for a human aren’t the same thing.”

“Well yeah, Sir, but—“

Jed tuts and waves his cigarette at Leo, blowing smoke up at the looming head and Leo’s nostrils flare appreciatively.

“But what? Nothing, it’s archaic! What are we, England?”

The great golden eyes roll, but Leo doesn’t interrupt. It’s a rant they’ve heard before. Leo stretches his neck over Jed with a murmur of ‘Dr. Bartlet’ and Abbey puts a hand briefly on his nose, scratching her nails over his scales. He returns his attention to Jed and Abbey watches them, and grins.

Between disease, age, and what has to be half of Germany’s munition still lodged under Leo’s scales she’d had no right to hope they’d both recover this well. If Jed paces slower and more carefully, and Leo is still too thin from stress, and the various wounds on his face are not healing up as fast as she’d like, well. It could have been so much worse.

“Well, what do you propose, sir? That we draft a special bill that covers every breed, every possible _crossbreed_ so we can see to it that every dragon can vote at _exactly_ its age of majority?” Leo asks.

“Why not?”

Leo groans seismically, the edges of his wings fluttering in exasperation and Abbey laughs out loud. Jed turns and beams at her, blowing another lungful of smoke at Leo.

“Hello, dear. Leo was just trying to hold back the rightful progression of dragon rights as a thing needfully separate of, but of course equal to that of the human race.”

“Oh yes sir, because separate but equal has always worked out so well for this government,” Leo says, stretching himself a little longer in the heavy afternoon sun and shooing Jed towards Abbey with one enormous talon. “Take him away, Abbey, he’s bored and bothering me and I’ll lose my job if I squish him.”

“Leo doesn’t love me anymore, Abbey, we don’t have our talks, we never cuddle.”

Abbey laughs as Jed catches her hand and ducks back towards Leo, closer, where he can’t easily reach them. Jed shakes his half-gone cigarette at Leo.

“Oh no, you’re not getting rid of me yet. I haven’t got anything world-threatening for at least fifteen minutes so we’re gonna discuss this, you and I.”

Leo lays his head on the warm, smooth stones of his pavilion, one amused gold eyes fixed on them. “I serve at the pleasure of the President.”

“Damn right.”

The setting sun gilds Leo’s face, making the pale lines of his scars stark. Jed is listing a little, favoring his wounded side. Abbey leans back against Leo’s chest, tugging Jed with her to where foreleg meets chest, where the scales are thinner and she can be surrounded by the warm, bellows-rush of Leo breathing and the slow, strong beating of a heart bigger than the both of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Idek you guys. Fucking dragons, amirite?


End file.
